Hi Matt! I used some old wooden frames and screen nailed across them for racks for years but finally broke down and bought an excalibur dehydrater. Best investment I ever made. I dry tons of stuff from my garden. I'm in west Texas and in the summer I keep the dehydrater outside while doing onions and tomatoes. Works great. Jim
On Jul 9, 2010, at 4:37 PM, Matt wrote: > Hi ya folks. Lately I've gotten into drying apples and cooking pies and stuff > out of them. Mainly, I started out buying them already done from a Mennonite > owned store. I quickly got addicted to them as snack food, then found recipes > for making pies and breads out of them. I looked up instructions on drying > your own. They suggested oven on the lowest setting, or in a car on a hot day. > The oven works, but your spouse complains about the oven always being busy, > and you can only get so many in there at 1 time. And it does take at least 6 > hours the way I did it. > My wife suggested I not buy a dehydrator, because as it is I am a gadget > buyer. And ya start running out of space to live after so long. > Just now I am considering building a wooden frame which would hold cookie > sheets stacked but spaced from one another 1 on top of the other, and buying > screen to cover the outside to keep some bugs out, and putting an old fan I > have out in storage in one end of it. My idea lacks the heat element factor, > but I live in east tx, and am figuring, I could set it up in the attic, or > out in a back room where there is no air conditioning. I could go to the > trouble of forming my own screen trays, if I wanted to build them, but then > cleaning something like that with a wood frame? I don't think that would last > long. Anyone ever done this stuff, say, to make jerky or whatever? > just curious. > > Matt > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
